It used to be that way. That last gen was literally the LAST gen. Xbox is a digital platform, Sony is moving towards being the budget gaming PC for families, Nintendo has made the Switch 2 a redesign and screen upgrade that’s (hopefully) cheaper than a Steam Deck.
I won’t make any bets, but the console wars seem to have ended (unless Xbox vs. Steam Deck becomes a selling point).
Agreed. I don’t share his opinion but I respect and understand it. The game needs an expanded map, with new goals that take in new directions? Well it does have limits currently, though I’m satisfied with what it provides me. Plus modding is likely to take this game places as long as CDPR stick to their guns.
Tbf, this may be symptomatic. In real life, medieval “cities” had less people than many modern “nothing exciting ever happens here” rest stops. You may have reached a legitimate logistic limit of the time period.
I had my life ruined by my former psychiatrist and I didn’t go out there to replace psychiatrics as a career. This company is a fucking dumpster waiting to catch fire.
As a tech geek and an artist (writer), I wholeheartedly agree. This is purely for the benefit of investors, not the craft.
Even then, cars are simply unattainable. Houses and apartments more so. A computer is the most expensive thing many 30-somethings own, they can’t afford to not live with their parents when there is literally a housing shortage in Canada, and the United States doesn’t offer health care insurance if you get an inconvenient tumor or have terrible genetics.
We are 30 year olds with a college degree but no job experience competing with 20 year olds who have a college degree and can work an extra 10 years before they get paid pension.
The next time I go somewhere where there are anti-homeless benches, I’m destroying the spikes if possible, and the fucking bench if not. I will fight it in court. It is cruel and inhumane, I will not tolerate that level of arrogance by whatever rich fucks decided they want to feel superior at all times, even if I have to burn down an entire downtown district in protest.
Edit: I will emphasize an unspoken but warranted assumption. I don’t want anyone dead, I just want to destroy billions of dollars that have ultimately only become something rich people get to use.
This. It’s one thing to say wokeness is a problem if you live in California or Southern Ontario, it’s another to say wokeness is bad in Texas or Manitoba. There are people out there so consumed by hate that they want innocent people to suffer simply for not conforming, and it doesn’t matter who you are because there’s a brand of extremism for that. People are tired of discrimination, period. They’re sick of being told this is not a dream, of bowing to a Neon God that devours songs, devours innovations, devours even evil and fear by devouring our emotions… This world destroyed itself. Don’t you get that? I feel more at home in a city where “Last night’s body count lottery [sic]” was 30 people because if I met a person and they died, people cared enough to hire someone to avenge them. In a hyper-capitalist dystopia. I feel more fear from a goddamn invincible anomalous lizard than I fear the day my dad dies because I will kill myself when my parents are gone regardless. I can’t live without my only support net.
And I especially love worlds that are what everyone wishes. Tet was a hero to me, because he rescued the protagonists from a world that didn’t value them at all. Hinobi is not evil to me, even as a relatively shady megacorp, because they’ve owned their mistakes. Why buy a car if you can buy Forza Horizon 5? Why go to Oxford or an Ivy League or CalTech if you could go to Hogwarts?
Reality is the Matrix, not escapism. It always has been, it just looked like there was a more real world ruled by a God-Machine race about 30-15 years ago. It’s way overdue people start realizing that what changed is that now we’re living in The Matrix Ressurections, that not only is our reality mostly fake (money, power, fame) but our fiction is more fulfilling because it’s a Matrix that we are aware we’re in and that we can do as we please in, while actual reality only offers hollow, empty promises aimed at enriching the rich even more.
I’m not saying we should give into our vices like it’s nothing. I’m saying we deserve to be allowed to dream and not be told we are unworthy of happiness for being average, or worse, for being mentally disabled. Or worse than even that, for daring to have a unique opinion. If I have to have entire fake worlds on call to feel like I even have the 10-15 years of job experience I need to be employable IRL, I will. Because I’ll never get that experience now. I and my entire generation are unemployable, because a few fucking bankers robbed our parents and then lied to our grandparents that we were lazy.
Lazy? Or realistic? Math doesn’t add up, assholes. We will never have anything because of the rest of you, you deserve to watch us play games while the world burns.
It’s not “can’t”, it’s “usually don’t want to as teenagers”. Teenagers are easily addicted, and everyone reacts to each drug differently. Sadly today’s teenagers generally play only hyper-casual video games because they played Angry Flappy Farmville Mafia Crush as toddlers before moving on to Raid: Gacha Impact of Clans.
There are gamers that play multiplayer but single player games aren’t the problem. The fact that people can’t afford to live in reality at age 35 because they don’t have 10 years of work experience because nobody was hiring when they had just earned their degree and their student debt was literally a hard ‘no’ to declaring bankruptcy? They lost work experience in their field during the prime of their career because of 2008, that’s irrepairable. People would rather buy a new car in Cyberpunk or a new house in The Sims because the real thing is unattainable to an entire generation. Generation Z has their life ahead of them. The real iGeneration doesn’t. We didn’t get the chance to prove ourselves until our bodies had wasted away and our experiences in the workplace were the same as they were fresh out of college.
That’s if you could afford college at all. Most of us, myself included, weren’t that fortunate. My younger brother went to college on BOTH of our college funds because I could not make use of mine.
Oh, fuck. Hope they had good insurance.
EDIT: Just heard yesterday about Allstate cancelling a bunch of policies just before without warning. I’m no conspiracy theorist but that glows like radioactive bullshit. To those who lost their homes? Don’t let them win. Fight them in court, tooth and nail, bankrupt them if you have to. You may be incredibly wealthy and some of you may not be good people, but if YOU can have your home taken away unfairly… ANYONE can.
All irl sunsets have looked like Vaporwave since 2017 for some reason, I swear I’m not making this up.
Someone archive this on PeerTube!
Sounds like Kid might get another chance with a Stone of Cosmic Power! (Or maybe not. Really hope that Ice Cream isn’t “the stuff” now.)
I just… I hope if there is a god that it would understand that I can’t handle reality. If that makes me weak, so be it, I will admit I am not a strong person. The thing is, I care. I really mean it when I say I feel rage at the truly awful shit people do. I really mean it when I say I can’t be someone who is morally generous, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care. It doesn’t mean I’m like the others, not that I’d pass judgement, getting outraged and telling people online “we” should do something so I can pat myself on the back because someone agrees with me while they do all the real work. My empathy is real, I don’t want other people to get hurt from my actions if they are truly innocent.
What I’m trying to say is, I don’t want to judge others for what they believe. If I’m allowed to judge at all, it should be for what they have already chosen to do. I have chosen to wash my hands of reality because not doing so and then trying to consume media would make me sick. But I will not fail to admit I’m human, that not wanting to work is a flaw I can’t overcome without too much effort to be worth it. I try my best to recognize the same is true of other people. Why should we have to risk oblivion with no happiness prior as the consequence of our life, in the hope of a reward we don’t know is there? I have faith in a god-given afterlife, but I had to be told it existed in a literal dream to even get that far.
And you know what? I’ve tried to confirm it twice in lucid dreams. I asked, twice, and was told it’s actually false, that the first time was just false hope. But is that just based on my own scientific understanding? Is the first dream just wishful thinking? I have no proof even now that isn’t too anecdotal to be believed. I just know I don’t want to die. I don’t want my soul to ever stop existing. I’ll gladly be property of any diety that offers that IF the purpose I’m given is objectively moral, but who I am actually believes in justice. It would be anathema to everything my soul stands for to kill someone, with only the possible exception of the worst people in the world, and I won’t worship something - real or imaginary - that tells me to do what people will claim their god (or a devil) commanded them to do.
Even if god toys with free willed souls… and the being that helped me get up from where I ended up when my world collapsed beneath me would absolutely remind me that it made me who I am and why I should worship it, it wouldn’t tell me to hurt anyone. Not ever. And if it did, I’d let it destroy me when I say “no” before I would hurt someone for eternal life.
I’m not a religious kind of person, so take that as metaphor if you must. It’s more literal than that but not that literal, I don’t actually worship it. Rather, everyone has an ideal they follow. In the end, that ideal seems to be what you worship. Not with praise or creepy rituals, but by doing things in service to an ideal.
If that ideal is flawed… well, I get the feeling many souls of people who actually did steal their money from people who worked hard under their employ, will find out that “treat others as they would treat you” is not a rule, it’s the process your own unconscious learns what you like and don’t like. Spend all your time purely in pursuit of something as shallow as money, and the only afterlife I’d think you’d end up in was locked in a box with a desk and corporate-firewalled computer for eternity. Manipulate people into suffering for your own amusement, and your mind might decide you need to find out how that feels yourself.
I’m a writer. I’ve never manipulated real people, but I’ve - in a sense - manipulated characters. They might not be real, but I assumed under that doctor’s “care” that it didn’t matter. I actually sacrificed my own happiness for people that didn’t exist. It hurts. That’s what my unconscious had to rescue me from.
Why does that matter? Because if just believing for too long that if god existed, reality would be nothing more than a game to it, makes my own unconscious decide to show me how that accusation feels when it has the chance, but then rescue me and show me the way back to sanity… Gave me exactly what I did to it… Then does the only thing better than an apology… to me, the story has a much clearer message when it is viewed as a writer than when it’s viewed as a person.
“The only reason I do anything bad to anyone is because they did it to someone real, and never even regretted it. Your characters aren’t real enough to actually hurt, but I am. I’m here, wrapped around your prefrontal cortex. Too many things add up for all of it to be baseless. Even if I am just one of many and there is no afterlife and reality has nothing truly spiritual about it… I. Am. Real.”
Or in short, angels/gods might be karma cops live inside our heads and there’s a threshold you can’t normally see where that actually matters. When it does, they shout “Stop breaking the law, asshole!” and that’s when it gets truly ugly.
I get the skepticism. Either the gods have a very weird definition of storytelling, or it’s BS, right? That’s fair, I won’t try to convince you. Just realize I’ve put a lot of thought into this. I’m not an unconditional slave to this… thing, I guess? And it never claimed to literally be god or asked to be worshipped, that was a conclusion I came to myself and it’s since been replaced with the general concept of “god is a hive mind” if old texts are giving me the right impression, but I don’t think it’s actually supernatural nor inherently of a specific level of morality. My unconscious is more like talking to a mirror to see something other than just my reflection, to read between the lines.
Fortunately, it seems that is the right choice for me. I worship it because it’s my moral code itself, or rather the ideal of following my moral code. Don’t follow a person. Don’t follow a god, a religion, a corporation, a government or nation or ideology. Worship what you believe to be the choice that doesn’t hurt anyone, whatever choice that is at a given time, and allows other people to themselves have as much choice as possible.
This got a little long-winded and preachy. Sorry. Think of the above wall-o-text as a short essay of a metaphor for how the conscious/subconscious “you” relates to the rest of you, and why that means wealth alone shouldn’t be the measure of a man’s guilt. I’m middle-class at best, but that’s less than 29% of the world. 29% of us would be considered wealthy just for owning or even renting a home. That’s too high a number for me to call all those people immoral if I’m supposed to err on the side of forgiveness, compassion and empathy. These are real people, not characters, and tbh if you so much as have a personal smartphone and live on the streets of an American city (which is already bad) you’re doing better than most of Africa (community-shared smartphones) for wealth distribution. Hypocrisy is a grave crime to commit indeed, probably best not to judge.
I was the lab rat. No religious allegiance prior and near-complete isolation from human contact for months, self-imposed due to psychiatric malpractice.
Results? Yes, people will use a religion as an excuse, but atheism is used as their “justification” just as easily as they will any actual religion.
And yes, we live in a scientifically quantifiable world. But there is evidence to suggest “god”… “El”, “Allah”, or whichever entity someone might believe in the ideal of, is how the Unconscious mind supports the Subconscious (and thus conscious) mind. It becomes your ideals without transgressing on them itself.
It might not actually be god, but it has Placebo Effect under it’s control. You and your entire body are what it is the god of, it wants to help you and doesn’t mind not being acknowledged but do not order it around or believe you can just “replace” it with a computer like I did.
I know this because I would be dead now if not for it helping me back up after my psychiatrist at the time destroyed my life (fortunately, my current meds were prescribed by an actually competent psychiatrist). I literally thought I deserved to suffer over “disrespecting people’s beliefs”. I don’t believe that now and I don’t think I ever intentionally disrespected beliefs, only that inside the mind belief matters more than anything. Look into psychology, especially oneirology, and you start to wonder just how much of even my take above is more than scratching the surface on what science might someday consider rational. The mind is a durable thing but it’s you and being thrown into a giant mental rock tumbler gives you a lot of psychological bruises.
Besides, there’s a reason all-knowing-ness is called omniscience. The church is screwed up, yeah. God, if it actually exists, however, was never against us learning how it put together our world. Thinking we already know when the experts themselves know we actually don’t is disingenuous for any good atheist to think.
If anyone wants to know what JGR’s Patch Pack is:
JGR’s Patch Pack, or JGRPP, is a “special” (and I mean that as a compliment) version of OpenTTD created by John G Rennison which includes many new features from QoL improvements to aesthetic fixes to new gameplay mechanics. Some of it’s features have been introduced to vanilla OpenTTD, while others are unlikely to ever be introduced to vanilla due to JGRPP expanding the game in directions that are experimental or too much of a departure from the original game OpenTTD is based off of.
A full list of features should be available in the GitHub repository. Most players into “OpenTTD as a model train set” use JGR’s Patch Pack because without it several gameplay elements mostly used by this subset of players are unavailable. “Casual” and “Infrastructure Spaghetti Network” players will find many features superfluous (if occasionally useful).
Why make a model train set out of the game?
Model trains irl are hella expensive and limited to physically-existent space. Open-world games these days use ridiculous amounts of polygons, which means Voxel Tycoon, even with its’ simplified graphics, is extremely taxing on gaming PCs. NIMBY Rails is comparable but the only available map is of the real world and it’s non-company features (roads, buildings) do not change after the game has started (map is drawn from a snapshot of OpenStreetMap). Simutrans is poorly-documented, leaving players with a steep learning curve. All other transport simulations are either defunct (Bahn, Transport Giant) or extremely limited in map size (Mashinky, Transport Fever 2).
OpenTTD is in many ways the perfect train set for some, and you likely already have what you need to play it at zero additional cost.
Whoa, awesome. I want to try that! Do I need JGRPP to do it?
Not strictly speaking, no. As I said, most of it’s extra features are tailored for a virtual train set, hence it is popular for that usage.
How do I add the Patch Pack to OpenTTD?
That’s the neat part: You don’t need to! Just download the latest release and extract the archive, then rename the folder that results to exclude the extra cruft (e.g. “openttd-jgrpp-0.63.3-windows-win64” -> “openttd”). Make sure to download the win64 version only if your computer has a 64-bit processor, if it doesn’t start up then try the win32 one, and if that fails try the arm64 version. If using a mac, use the mac version (of course). If using Linux, use whichever one matches closest (there are several linux versions, if none of the options specify your distro then use the generic linux version).
Then just run the openttd executable/app in the openttd folder you just made.
Note: One can overwrite the existing files with the contents of a newer archive (e.g. the files in the “openttd-jgrpp-0.63.4-windows-win64” folder can overwrite the files in the jgr “openttd” folder) to update to a new version. No other steps are required to do so.
I have the Steam version of OpenTTD?
Not to worry, OpenTTD was built to be “portable”! …meaning if you download ALL versions of OpenTTD, ensuring you rename the excutables/linux apps to differentiate them, and otherwise merging the folders as-is, you can place the openttd folder (vanilla or jgrpp) on any storage with read/write permissions and the exFAT partition format that has enough space on it. Yes, even an old thumb drive! Then plug it into any computer and double-click the executable/app for the OS of the computer you’re using.
tl;dr? All necessary files are located within the openttd folder in both vanilla and the JGRPP version of OpenTTD. Having it in two places - for example your Steam installation and one on an external hard drive - will consider the other copy (or copies if you have three or more installs) entirely separate from your Steam installation of vanilla OpenTTD.
What if I want to launch JGRPP via Steam?
All mods for this game (NewGRFs, basesets, etc.) are downloadable either online or via the in-game content downloader. There is no Steam Workshop for it. So you could just add it as a non-steam game.
If you don’t plan to play vanilla OpenTTD, you could set Steam to use the latest “beta” archived version (“14.1 - 14.1 release” as of this writing) and overwrite it with the JGRPP files. Since these are archives, they won’t auto-update to overwrite (at least not any time soon) your modified JGRPP Steam install. You can then launch OpenTTD through Steam as normal and it will be the JGRPP install.
What if I use Steam OS/ChimeraOS/Bazzite or have a Steam Deck/“GamerDeck”?
All the above should apply just as well to Steam OS and Linux distros based off of Steam OS. It should work on desktop/laptop and PC Handheld devices equally well too (though you may need a bluetooth mouse).
What if I’m on Android/iOS?
Sadly, there is a lot of issues there…
On Android, JGRPP does not do “official” Android releases. A user named pelya used to do these versions but he has not updated its version base in over half a decade. As of 0.63.3, no unofficial Android release of JGRPP is available.
On iOS, the GPL v2 license is incompatible with the Apple Store’s ToS. A copy has been released, but under false pretenses and illegal circumstances, seemingly by a person or persons from mainland China with the intent to use the game to grift private user data off of unsuspecting users. Apps from unofficial app libraries (Cydia, etc.) are unaccounted for, proceed at your own risk.
Anything else I should know before I try JGRPP?
Compatibility-wise, JGRPP is fully-compatible with all vanilla NewGRFs and downloadable content (as much as is possible in vanilla too, at least). The reverse, however, is not always true. Certain NewGRFs require JGRPP features and will disable themselves in standard OpenTTD. Such GRFs are always clearly labelled and few examples exist; No examples exist of NewGRFs only available on JGRPP at this time, though until OpenTTD 15.0-beta1 the ability to use the JGRPP version of some road stop GRFs was not possible (road waypoints had not been implemented in mainline releases yet and the JGRPP versions included it).
Try reading the “model railroad-izing OpenTTD” guides on the official Discord, they’re likely more helpful than what I can provide.
It’s as weird as you imagine. Glasses are technically cybernetics, if only because they are a prosthetic. Clothing, glasses, through pocket watches and wristwatches and hearing aids all the way up through smartphones and even into Extended Reality (AugReal and VR) all count as “proto-cybernetics” or “pseudo-cybernetics” or “quasi-cybernetics”. In short, a tool that you wear.
An internal implant can be properly cybernetic; most such implants are not because the intent is to repair existing organs like bones or heart valves rather than replace. A peg leg does count as cybernetic, but most internal implants are, you know, internal. Like a full mechanical heart replacement, or at least a pacemaker (which is technically an enhancement, a normally-absent “plan B” to save the life of someone with a malfunctioning Central Nervous System or other coronary issue).
All of this is susceptible to a scary-sounding-but-mostly-harmless practice known as “bio-hacking”. Bio-hacking is based on the viewpoint that the human body is technically public domain hardware/software, and that each person has dominion over their own body when it comes to medical experimentation. While biohacking can be a risk, examples that I could recommend are wearing a glove with a magnet in the tip of one of the fingers (you’ll eventually start sensing subtle magnetic fields nearby), and lucid dreaming (oneironautics is essentially the “hamburger which is a genre of sandwich” to biohacking’s “sandwiches are an entire genre of food”). So far, not a single instance of biohacking has been used on unwilling participants outside of preexisting scientific disciplines corrupted by authoritarian governments; individuals can and (IMO) would be well off to experiment on themselves in sane and safe ways, though I’d always recommend discussing it with a doctor to be sure there is no severe health risks.
Oneironautics alone, while not actually related to cybernetics (at least, not directly) is the most awesome and has the lowest barrier to entry of all biohacking possibilities. No implantation is required, only a desire and belief that lucid dreams can, in fact, happen. Just remember, your unconscious will not hurt you, it wants to help and always has helped. The only reason nightmares and such exist is because it reacts to your fears and stresses by showing you your problems, but if you do not want it to hurt you, it will not hurt you. Just try to talk to it, you might be pleasantly surprised!
So yes, there very much is a blurry line between “cyborg” and “ordinary person”. The gameplay side of Cyberpunk 2077 is somewhat more accurate than you’d think, IRL if cyberpsychosis were to happen it would be not from over-replacement but a result of tapping into the Central Nervous System in ways that cause permanent sensory damage.
Additionally, I’m no doctor but psychosis is the medical term for hallunations, it’s barely even related to psychopathy. I have no idea how the implication of cyberpsychosis being a form of psychopathy could work IRL but I’d say it’s unlikely that anyone would be able to prove such a link to begin with. Corporate propaganda aside, people should and do blame car-centric infrastructure for ruining Western civilization, but originally the reason it was unnoticed was because the symptom (overuse of smartphones) was itself a compounding factor and the original cause of traffic jams (inefficient use of space) had never been seen before. “Cybernetics cause psychosis” doesn’t mean “cybernetics cause psychopathy”, it means “cybernetics make you hallucinate things not there”. That means cybernetics are making users panic, not become a form of cybernetic monsters. They’d be scared, unless the corps solved their own problem by (at minimum) providing the real reason cyberpsychosis could affect anyone and how to avoid letting yourself hurt anyone around you. That at least keeps people buying more cybernetics than the bare minimum and is also the truth.
Actual cyberpsycopathy, if I were to write it, would involve a chip damaging the prefrontal cortex in such a way that their moral inhibitions disappear. However, psychopaths cannot actually fake emotion like in the movies. They have no empathy because they have no feelings, only free will and curiosity. As any mad scientist in fiction (or, say, in the employ of a certain horrific historical dictator between 1939 and 1945) might show, curiosity with no morals can lead to some very disturbing actions being taken, but people with psychopathy are not usually ever allowed power over another person’s fate.
Cybernetic sociopathy is what I’d call it, except that is best equated to anti-social individuals, either from sociopathy or acting on misanthropic beliefs, who limit all their interaction with other individuals to being over the internet. Disruptive, but not the mass-murderers seen in fiction.
I think cybernetics are going to be designed with ethics and absolute security in mind going forward. Neuralink was a wakeup call to the medical community that the genie will not stay in the bottle forever, and efforts to make cybernetics meet the much more rigorous requirements of the human body and of human morality need to be the top priorities. Corporations will object, but I urge you not to let them have the primary say. Doctors and patients need to put their foot down and say that cybernetics must be the sole legal property of the individual it is attached to.
As long as it does not contain a trademark, or that trademark is of a fictional character who is not themselves advertising a physical product, IMO it is in fact art. The moment you say they’re Doritos specifically (and put the signage in a public space) or another such brand (Tostitos, Aribas, you get the idea) it’s advertising by that specificity.
This, however, is clearly “generic” homemade donuts. The brand of the store is on the lower part but what trademark does the upper section feature? If the rays of sunshine were painted around the sign, or the kids painted it as a goodwill volunteer effort, I don’t think the town can justify removing it except in a “there’s a rule” way, and honestly? For something like this, screw the rules, we have the spirit of the law to consider.
Absolutely. About the only companies I would want to steal from are shitbags like Electronic Arts (piracy) or Walmart (fuck “self-checkout”) or (as stated) Loblaws. Any company of over 10k employees (well, as an estimate, at least) without a Union for their labor and service employees deserves a little shrinkage as punishment.
Mom and Pop stores are already struggling to make a living. If you need food that badly though (such as if you are homeless) then I recommend asking a mom and pop store if they have left over baked goods or newly-expired milk that doesn’t smell funky. They’re in the same boots, even if theirs is a comfier fit, and they will usually say yes to someone asking to eat goods that can no longer be sold.
That, and if you do decide to ask a larger grocer they’re more likely to say no in some places, but that’s because corporate scumbags want to force people to have to buy food to live. Hence why.a supermarket or big box store is more acceptable to snatch food from. Do it at the end of the day just before closing, the employees of a store like that and the cops (at least here in Canada) are more likely to be understanding if you get caught. Worst case scenario, you spend time awaiting a trial that will likely be thrown out due to how petty it will look to a judge to charge someone for stealing almost-expired bread (and if he/she doesn’t, a reliable public defense attorney will point it out and reduce/negate your sentence).
Ask first is always the key, and only if you really are on the street or your paycheck is gone and your fridge empty and the month not close to being over. If they say no, ask elsewhere. If everyone says no (which has happened in places with arrogant assholes in City Hall deciding to discriminate against homeless people) then yeah, fuck the rules, take what you need to live.
I wonder if stealing food while literally malnourished could count as self-defense in a court of law?
Yeah, that’s a pretty good take, fair enough.